The present invention relates to a photo-printing apparatus and, more particularly, to a photo-printing apparatus capable of printing by projection exposure in parallel with printing by exposure of a digital image such as index printing, for one roll of film.
With a conventional photo-printing apparatus, digital printing is unable to be performed during ordinary printing, and vice versa. Therefore, index prints (by digital printing) and ordinary prints are separately exposed and developed for one order of films from a customer. For this reason, manual operations are required to collate the respective images of the index print and ordinary prints with each other to group the prints for each order.
Further, while either of the digital printing and the ordinary printing is performed, the other functions of the apparatus including the printing function for the rest are unable to be used effectively. Moreover, since index prints and ordinary prints must be separately exposed and developed and then the two types of prints are required to be collated with each other for each order, as described above, lengthy operations are needed to complete a series of printing processes.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to overcome the foregoing problems and to provide a photo-printing apparatus in which exposure time is remarkably reduced and which avoids wasteful use of a photosensitive material.